Search engine optimization (SEO) is a lot like grandma’s jam recipe — if you have all the ingredients in the right quantities, it will produce sweet results.

Wait. What’s SEO?SEO is the key ingredient to getting your website seen. It is exactly as it sounds: a way to optimize search results when people use Google, Yahoo or Bing to look for the products and services related to your business. The better your SEO is, the higher you will rank. The higher you rank, the better chance you have of people discovering your products or services. SEO is a free way of increasing your website traffic. Search engines have a recipes (algorithms) that they use to rank websites. When your website has the ingredients in that recipe, the better it is at garnering organic/free traffic from around the web. SEO can’t be bought — but you can pay someone to optimize your site (Hint, hint, nudge, nudge. That’s one of the services Niteowl Creative offers.) Recipe for SEO successWe know the main ingredients in a good SEO recipe, so get out a pen and paper and add these to your shopping list.

Quality content: This means content that is robust with substance, not just filler. It’s sprinkled with keywords, engages the audience and is updated frequently. Content is the cornerstone of SEO. (This third-party chart even says so!)

Good site architecture/design: This means that your website is built in a way that allows search engines to easily crawl it and pull out relevant information. Having your site work on mobile devices, using keywords and page titles in your URLs, and having design that makes the words easier to read are all factors that contribute to overall web performance.

Solid HTML: Header tags, title tags, meta description tags, structured data and loading speed of your site all matter. This is the behind-the-scenes stuff that your web person should know all about (and if that person doesn’t, we do!)

There are other SEO ingredients that are out of your control, for example, how much your website is shared by others on social media, or how often your website is referenced by other reputable sources on the web.

Having the main ingredients — content, architecture/design and HTML — will get you started on savoury SEO, but it’s not a set-and-forget dish. Search engines tweak and refine the recipe for success all the time, so you have to be doing the same to your website.

You wouldn’t use moldy strawberries to make jam and then serve it to your guests would you? Well, that’s exactly what you’re doing when you launch a website and then don’t do anything with it for a year.

If you need help, Niteowl Creative is here. We even have some secret ingredients that will help boost the flavour of your website, and your jam. (Okay, that’s a lie. We know nothing about making jam. We just like to eat it.)